(1) Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to methods for display of whole immunoglobulins or libraries of immunoglobulins on the surface of eukaryote host cells, including mammalian, plant, yeast, and filamentous fungal cells. The methods are useful for screening libraries of eukaryotic host cells that produce recombinant immunoglobulins to identify particular immunoglobulins with desired properties. The methods are particularly useful for screening immunoglobulin libraries in eukaryote host cells to identify host cells that express an immunoglobulin of interest at high levels, as well as host cells that express immunoglobulins that have high affinity for specific antigens.
(2) Description of Related Art
The discovery of monoclonal antibodies has evolved from hybridoma technology for producing the antibodies to direct selection of antibodies from human cDNA or synthetic DNA libraries. This has been driven in part by the desire to engineer improvements in binding affinity and specificity of the antibodies to improve efficacy of the antibodies. Thus, combinatorial library screening and selection methods have become a common tool for altering the recognition properties of proteins (Ellman et al., Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA 94: 2779 -2782 (1997): Phizicky & Fields, Microbiol. Rev. 59: 94-123 (1995)). The ability to construct and screen antibody libraries in vitro promises improved control over the strength and specificity of antibody-antigen interactions.
The most widespread technique for constructing and screening antibody libraries is phage display, whereby the protein of interest is expressed as a polypeptide fusion to a bacteriophage coat protein and subsequently screened by binding to immobilized or soluble biotinylated ligand. Fusions are made most commonly to a minor coat protein, called the gene III protein (pIII), which is present in three to five copies at the tip of the phage. A phage constructed in this way can be considered a compact genetic “unit”, possessing both the phenotype (binding activity of the displayed antibody) and genotype (the gene coding for that antibody) in one package. Phage display has been successfully applied to antibodies, DNA binding proteins, protease inhibitors, short peptides, and enzymes (Choo & Klug, Curr. Opin. Biotechnol. 6: 431-436 (1995); Hoogenboom, Trends Biotechnol. 15: 62-70 (1997); Ladner, Trends Biotechnol. 13: 426-430 (1995); Lowman et al., Biochemistry 30: 10832-10838 (1991); Markland et al., Methods Enzymol. 267: 28-51 (1996); Matthews & Wells, Science 260: 1113-1117 (1993); Wang et al., Methods Enzymol. 267: 52-68 (1996)).
Antibodies possessing desirable binding properties are selected by binding to immobilized antigen in a process called “panning”. Phage bearing nonspecific antibodies are removed by washing, and then the bound phage are eluted and amplified by infection of E. coli. This approach has been applied to generate antibodies against many antigens.
Nevertheless, phage display possesses several shortcomings. Although panning of antibody phage display libraries is a powerful technology, it possesses several intrinsic difficulties that limit its wide-spread successful application. For example, some eukaryotic secreted proteins and cell surface proteins require post-translational modifications such as glycosylation or extensive disulfide isomerization, which are unavailable in bacterial cells. Furthermore, the nature of phage display precludes quantitative and direct discrimination of ligand binding parameters. For example, very high affinity antibodies (Kd≦1 nM) are difficult to isolate by panning, since the elution conditions required to break a very strong antibody-antigen interaction are generally harsh enough (e.g., low pH, high salt) to denature the phage particle sufficiently to render it non-infective.
Additionally, the requirement for physical immobilization of an antigen to a solid surface produces many artifactual difficulties. For example, high antigen surface density introduces avidity effects which mask true affinity. Also, physical tethering reduces the translational and rotational entropy of the antigen, resulting in a smaller DS upon antibody binding and a resultant overestimate of binding affinity relative to that for soluble antigen and large effects from variability in mixing and washing procedures lead to difficulties with reproducibility. Furthermore, the presence of only one to a few antibodies per phage particle introduces substantial stochastic variation, and discrimination between antibodies of similar affinity becomes impossible. For example, affinity differences of six-fold or greater are often required for efficient discrimination (Riechmann & Weill, Biochem. 32: 8848-55 (1993)). Finally, populations can be overtaken by more rapidly growing wild-type phage. In particular, since pIII is involved directly in the phage life cycle, the presence of some antibodies or bound antigens will prevent or retard amplification of the associated phage.
Additional bacterial cell surface display methods have been developed (Francisco, et al., Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA 90: 10444-10448 (1993); Georgiou et al., Nat. Biotechnol. 15: 29-34 (1997)). However, use of a prokaryotic expression system occasionally introduces unpredictable expression biases (Knappik & Pluckthun, Prot. Eng. 8: 81-89 (1995); Ulrich et al., Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA 92: 11907-11911 (1995); Walker & Gilbert, J. Biol. Chem 269: 28487-28493 (1994)) and bacterial capsular polysaccharide layers present a diffusion barrier that restricts such systems to small molecule ligands (Roberts, Annu. Rev. Microbiol. 50: 285-315 (1996)). E. coli possesses a lipopolysaccharide layer or capsule that may interfere sterically with macromolecular binding reactions. In fact, a presumed physiological function of the bacterial capsule is restriction of macromolecular diffusion to the cell membrane, in order to shield the cell from the immune system (DiRienzo et al., Ann. Rev. Biochem. 47: 481-532, (1978)). Since the periplasm of E. coli has not evolved as a compartment for the folding and assembly of antibody fragments, expression of antibodies in E. coli has typically been very clone dependent, with some clones expressing well and others not at all. Such variability introduces concerns about equivalent representation of all possible sequences in an antibody library expressed on the surface of E. coli. Moreover, phage display does not allow some important posttranslational modifications such as glycosylation that can affect specificity or affinity of the antibody. About a third of circulating monoclonal antibodies contain one or more N-linked glycans in the variable regions. In some cases it is believed that these N-glycans in the variable region may play a significant role in antibody function.
The efficient production of monoclonal antibody therapeutics would be facilitated by the development of alternative test systems that utilize lower eukaryotic cells, such as yeast cells. The structural similarities between B-cells displaying antibodies and yeast cells displaying antibodies provide a closer analogy to in vivo affinity maturation than is available with filamentous phage. In particular, because lower eukaryotic cells are able to produce glycosylated proteins, whereas filamentous phage cannot, monoclonal antibodies produced in lower eukaryotic host cells are more likely to exhibit similar activity in humans and other mammals as they do in test systems which utilize lower eukaryotic host cells.
Moreover, the ease of growth culture and facility of genetic manipulation available with yeast will enable large populations to be mutagenized and screened rapidly. By contrast with conditions in the mammalian body, the physicochemical conditions of binding and selection can be altered for a yeast culture within a broad range of pH, temperature, and ionic strength to provide additional degrees of freedom in antibody engineering experiments. The development of yeast surface display system for screening combinatorial protein libraries has been described.
U.S. Pat. Nos. 6,300,065 and 6,699,658 describe the development of a yeast surface display system for screening combinatorial antibody libraries and a screen based on antibody-antigen dissociation kinetics. The system relies on transfecting yeast with vectors that express an antibody or antibody fragment fused to a yeast cell wall protein, using mutagenesis to produce a variegated population of mutants of the antibody or antibody fragment and then screening and selecting those cells that produce the antibody or antibody fragment with the desired enhanced phenotypic properties. U.S. Pat. No. 7,132,273 discloses various yeast cell wall anchor proteins and a surface expression system that uses them to immobilize foreign enzymes or polypeptides on the cell wall.
Of interest are Tanino et al, Biotechnol. Prog. 22: 989-993 (2006), which discloses construction of a Pichia pastoris cell surface display system using Flo1p anchor system; Ren et al., Molec. Biotechnol. 35:103-108 (2007), which discloses the display of adenoregulin in a Pichia pastoris cell surface display system using the Flo1p anchor system; Mergler et al., Appl. Microbiol. Biotechnol. 63:418-421 (2004), which discloses display of K. lactis yellow enzyme fused to the C-terminus half of S. cerevisiae α-agglutinin; Jacobs et al., Abstract T23, Pichia Protein expression Conference, San Diego, Calif. (Oct. 8-11, 2006), which discloses display of proteins on the surface of Pichia pastoris using α-agglutinin; Ryckaert et al., Abstracts BVBMB Meeting, Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Belgium (Dec. 2, 2005), which discloses using a yeast display system to identify proteins that bind particular lectins; U.S. Pat. No. 7,166,423, which discloses a method for identifying cells based on the product secreted by the cells by coupling to the cell surface a capture moiety that binds the secreted product, which can then be identified using a detection means; U.S. Published Application No. 2004/0219611, which discloses a biotin-avidin system for attaching protein A or G to the surface of a cell for identifying cells that express particular antibodies; U.S. Pat. No. 6,919,183, which discloses a method for identifying cells that express a particular protein by expressing in the cell a surface capture moiety and the protein wherein the capture moiety and the protein form a complex which is displayed on the surface of the cell; U.S. Pat. No. 6,114,147, which discloses a method for immobilizing proteins on the surface of a yeast or fungal using a fusion protein consisting of a binding protein fused to a cell wall protein which is expressed in the cell.
The potential applications of engineering antibodies for the diagnosis and treatment of human disease such as cancer therapy, tumor imaging, sepsis are far-reaching. For these applications, antibodies with high affinity (i.e., Kd≦10 nM) and high specificity are highly desirable. Anecdotal evidence, as well as the a priori considerations discussed previously, suggests that phage display or bacterial display systems are unlikely to consistently produce antibodies of sub-nanomolar affinity. Also, antibodies identified using phage display or bacterial display systems may not be susceptible to commercial scale production in eukaryotic cells. To date, no system has been developed which can accomplish such purpose, and be used.
Therefore, development of further protein expression systems based on improved vectors and host cell lines in which effective protein display facilitates development of genetically enhanced cells for recombinant production of immunoglobulins is a desirable objective.